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BUTTER, MELTED (another way)
Take a piece of butter the size of a hen's egg, cut it into three or four slices, and work in as much of a dessert-spoonful of flour as the butter will take up. Put this into a saucepan with three-quarters of a pint of cold water, keep stirring in one direction as the butter melts, and dust in what remains of the flour. When they are well mixed, smooth, and the sauce boils up, it is ready for serving. Or the lump of butter may be simply put in the saucepan, then mixed with flour to form a paste, and have cold water added to make it of the right consistency. When this method is adopted the sauce must be stirred till it boils. Good melted butter, even if smooth, should not be too thick or pasty. It will acquire that condition by being kept waiting too long at the side of the stove. In that case it can easily be thinned by the addition of more butter and a little warm water.
This is the English sauce called simply "melted butter" — a thin butter-and-flour sauce, the base for parsley, egg, caper and shrimp sauces rather than a bowl of clarified butter. It is a roux built cold, which is why the stirring instruction carries so much weight.
- Butter the size of a hen's eggAbout 2 oz (55-60 g). The comparison was common shorthand in Victorian books, but it is an approximation, not a precise measure.
- A dessert-spoonful of flourRoughly 2 teaspoons, about 10 ml, or some 5-7 g depending on how it is scooped. Note that the recipe divides it: some is kneaded into the butter, the rest dusted in later.
- Three-quarters of a pintImperial measure, so 15 fl oz / about 425 ml, not the 12 fl oz an American pint would give. That is a great deal of liquid for 2 teaspoons of flour, and the result will be very thin by modern expectations — for a pouring sauce that coats, use half the water or double the flour.
- Stirring in one directionFolklore rather than physics; a sauce does not split from a change of direction. What matters is constant motion from cold, so the flour hydrates evenly before the butter melts and the starch swells.
- It must boilThe hinge of the method. Flour-thickened sauces taste raw and pasty unless brought properly to the boil, as the starch swells and the sauce reaches its final thickness. The recipe treats it as ready the moment it boils up.
- Keeping it waitingThe warning about the sauce going pasty at the side of the stove is about evaporation and continued starch swelling. The fix given — more butter and warm water — works, but cover the pan and keep it off direct heat instead.
- YieldEnough for four to six as an accompaniment to boiled fish, vegetables or a boiled fowl. Stir in chopped parsley, capers or a chopped hard-boiled egg at the end for the usual variations.
Melted butter was the workhorse sauce of the English kitchen from the eighteenth century onward, the thing poured over boiled cod, asparagus, plum pudding and almost anything else that arrived at table unadorned. French cooks were unkind about it — the line that England has many religions and only one sauce is attributed variously, to Voltaire and to the Neapolitan Caraccioli among others, and the wording shifts with every retelling. A cook who could make it smooth could make a béchamel; a cook who could not produced the pasty, floury stuff the last two sentences here are written to rescue. The two methods offered, kneading the flour into cold butter versus making a paste and letting down with water, are both cold-start techniques, avoiding the cooked roux the French would have used and giving a sauce that tastes distinctly of butter rather than of browned flour.